Tuesday, May 28, 2024

Bill Walton, two-time nba champion, dies at 71

By A Texas Reader
monday, may 27, 2024 at 02:07:30 p.m. edt
Posted by at

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

jerry pdx
Living in Portland during the championship season I remember Walton and Blazers well. I didn't attend the game but was at the celebration parade downtown and will never forget the sight of the team rolling down Broadway shaking people's hands, I reached out and shook both him and coach Ramsey's hand as they went by. I don't know if that would even be allowed nowadays.

Walton would have been one of the greatest all time centers if not for injuries which limited his career to just a few productive seasons. But when he did play, he was great, going head to head with Jabbar and playing him fairly equally and winning championships in 2 of his 3 healthy seasons.

He was always left wing though and considers himself to be an "activist", his early days he adopted the hippie counterculture style and jumped on every leftist cause that came down the pike. However, in his later years during retirement in San Diego, he experienced some negative encounters with homeless near his home, being assaulted and harassed by homeless while riding his bike. Result is he erects barbed wire fences around his home to keep nearby homeless campers off his property and starts pressuring the mayor (Democrat) to deal with the homeless "problem":

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/homelessness/story/2022-10-08/for-bill-walton-the-homeless-crisis-has-become-personal

Classic "progressive" that gets hit with a dose of reality. It's kind of hilarious, 40 yrs. ago he would have excoriated well off people for acting the same way.

Tuesday, May 28, 2024 at 5:04:00 PM EDT
Anonymous said...

Remembering that you like to play some b-ball,I wondered if you participated in that year's celebration.Walton was just too big and exuberant for his own feet.Finally a surgeon re-did his arches in 1981-82 and he played without pain the rest of his career,winning another title and 6th man award with Boston in 85-86.

With Walton being a vegetarian,I'm a little surprised he got the big "C",but that's like a lifetime,long distance runner dropping dead of a heart attack.

Go figure.




--GRA

Tuesday, May 28, 2024 at 8:24:00 PM EDT
Anonymous said...

jerry pdx
He started the veggie thing pretty early in life, I always wondered if that contributed to his "brittle" bones. Reality is, despite what vegetarians want to believe the human body needs animal proteins for optimum physical strength and mental development. Doesn't mean humans can't live without them but for an elite level athlete like Walton needed to maximize his diet to account for the pressure a high impact sport put on his near 7 ft. frame.

Tuesday, May 28, 2024 at 11:47:00 PM EDT

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